The lesson to be gleaned from the trade pulled off by the Grizzlies and Cavaliers on Tuesday—a three-for-one, in which the one is Jon Leuer and his 2.4-points-per-game average—goes back, of course, to the

luxury tax. That’s because, for the great mass of teams around the league, the tax is a very real and scary proposition, one that kicks fully into gear after the season thanks to the new collective-bargaining agreement reached after 2011’s lockout.

The Grizzlies were about $4 million over the tax threshold, which would have cost them a payment of $6 million in tax to the league (the penalty is $1.50 for every $1 over the threshold, which is about $70 million for this year). That would have pushed their $74 million payroll to $80 million. By shedding the salaries of Marreese Speights, Wayne Ellington and Josh Selby, the Grizzlies have gotten their payroll to $68 million—which means no tax and thus, a savings of $12 million.

But even that maneuver counts only as a temporary fix-up for the team. The Grizzlies have not addressed the real problem, which is that their frontcourt—Zach Randolph, Rudy Gay and Marc Gasol—is earning $47 million this year. It is slated to make $50 million next year, and almost $52 million the following year. You just can’t pay three players that much money and expect to fill out a credible roster around them. Memphis dodged the tax bullet for now, but the Grizzlies are still committed to $68 million in salary next year, and that’s for eight players. Someone in that Randolph-Gay-Gasol trio is still going to have to go.

For the NBA at large, this is exactly how the luxury tax penalties were supposed to work. If the model for building a team in the past was to get three star players together, and put together role players around them, that model clearly isn’t going to work anymore. You can’t have three stars without going into luxury-tax land, and luxury-tax land is not a fun place to be. The idea is that teams with three stars would have to shuttle one off to somewhere else, and that somewhere else would then become a better team. When David Stern and Adam Silver spoke over and over about creating competitive balance in the last CBA negotiation, we’re seeing that in action.

At least we will see it in action when Gay eventually lands in Toronto or Charlotte or somewhere else on draft night. We’ve already seen it happen in Oklahoma City, where the Thunder knew they couldn’t afford

There is just one problem, though—teams that care not about their tax bills. That is a wrinkle in the quest for balance, and it should be notable that the two markets that have had to sacrifice players in order to avoid the tax are both decidedly small markets. The Lakers are wobbling through this season with a payroll at $100 million, and a potential tax payment of (gulp) $80 million. That’s the price of having not three, but four (Steve Nash, Dwight Howard, Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol) stars, with Bryant getting the equivalent of two star-level paychecks.

through 2014-’15. Those three teams are looking at hefty tax bills—and when the dreaded “repeater tax” kicks in for the ’14-’15 season, those bills will spike, as tax rates jump by an extra dollar for every dollar over the threshold.

“The question then is how much that handful of teams is worried about paying $40 million in taxes,” one general manager said. “If they’re worried about it, they’re going to have to get in line with the rest of us and figure out how to structure a payroll in a way that makes sense with the salary cap and the taxes. If not, then there’s going to be 26 teams acting one way and four playing under different rules.”

In other words, so long, level playing field. If you’ve got Mikhail Prokhorov or Mickey Arison behind you, you might be willing to stick with the three-star method. If you’re the Grizzlies or Thunder, you’ve got to make sacrifices.

Recent history in the NBA shows that spendthrift payrolls don’t necessarily yield the best teams, or even good teams—the Knicks for much of this century were proof of that. Being locked into a team that guarantees you a spot on the wrong side of the tax line will cost teams their flexibility, as tax-paying teams don’t have the same ability to sign players that non-taxpayers have. Because it is rare that a team pays three star-level salaries and gets star-level production from all three players, the rules will still have an impact on those teams not afraid to pay a big tax bill.

Still, there is no question that the effects of the tax rules have been most obviously felt in small markets. And in the Grizzlies’ case, we have not seen the last of those effects.